In psychology, there has been an ever-increasing interest in research and theories connected to trait versus state. Trait and state are about features of our personality and are concepts that people use to both describe and understand themselves and others.
Traits are thought of as stable, long-lasting, and internally caused. We can use traits to predict the present from the past, because of the dependability of these traits.
An example of a trait would be anxiety, where someone considers themselves an anxious person and they have baseline anxiety that is higher than most people.
States on the other hand are temporary, brief, and said to be caused by external circumstances. There can be predictability to states too, but this is where certain events or situations dependably lead to changes in thoughts, feelings or behaviours.
An example of a state could also be anxiety, but in this case, anxiety is not constant but instead rises in specific circumstances.
It’s become common to talk about and treat trait and state as if they are two discrete categories. But there is a lot of influence and synergy between the two of them.
Last week I released an episode of the podcast with Summer Innanen all about body image. Summer is doing incredible work and I loved getting the chance to chat with her about a topic that we both spend a lot of time helping clients with. If you haven’t listened to the episode, check it out here.
Body image is an attribute that we can think about in terms of trait and state. And what I want to do as part of this article is look at how we deal with body image issues with this context in mind: how do we deal with it at the trait level, the state level and how these both coalesce and influence one another.
During the podcast, I asked Summer to define body image and she said “on a simplistic level, body image is how we feel about our body.”
If we look at this in more detail, different components make up our assessment of our body image. As I cover in this article, this includes:
One of the things that summer and I talked about was the interplay between body image and self-worth. Especially at the level of body image as a trait, how someone feels about their body image is a fairly reliable predictor of how they feel about their self-worth.
Because if someone has body image issues, there is usually conditional acceptance of themselves as a person. They make struggle in other areas of life:
It’s not that every one of the above examples will be true for every person with poor body image, but these are common. And as you can see, most of them are not really connected to body image per se but are more about self-worth and how you think about yourself as a human being.
At the level of body image as a trait, there can be work done on improving your relationship with the aesthetics of the body. So, you feel differently about how your stomach or your arms or your cheeks look. And if you end up liking how these parts look, that’s great.
There are many writing exercises I do with clients about this and mirror and photo work are helpful with this too.
Because there is power in learning to truly see your body for how it is versus the negatively distorted view that many people have. And when you can learn to look at your body from an objective rather than a critical place, it’s incredible how much a shift can occur.
But the more important end goal with body image work is not about liking the way your body looks. Instead, it’s about neutrality.
It’s about detaching your thoughts about how your body looks from how you feel about yourself and your body.
It’s about moving away from your appearance being a dictator of whether today is a good or bad day or whether you feel valid and valuable as a human being.
So, at the level of body image as a trait, body image work is a little about body image in how this term is widely used but is mostly about things most people don’t instantly think about when they think of body image work.
Every human knows from experience that body image (like many aspects of how we think about ourselves) is not steady but is regularly in flux.
In my original definition of state, I wrote it is “said to be caused by external circumstances.” The reason I wrote “said to be” is because I don’t think that this is always true. Often, it is a combination of your internal state meeting some external experience.
For example, some of the external triggers that can cause a change in body image are:
What’s interesting when I look at the above list is that some of these triggers are obviously connected to the body and how it looks and can therefore lead to comparison and assessment of your own body.
But some have nothing to do with body image, but still, you end up in that place. Some are even positive, like hearing about a job vacancy, and yet they still lead to a negative focus on body image.
This is because fixing your body is a coping mechanism. When strong emotions arise, you can gain a semblance of control by directing your attention to something that you feel you have control over.
So you plan your eating schedule or exercise routine and have a specific goal in mind. You imagine how life will feel when you reach this place and daydream about how different things will be.
But while the above list is external triggers, there is much that can go on at the internal level that also affects the state of your body image. These are factors that impact your physiology, which has the knock-on effect of impacting your psychology.
Anything that affects your energy balance and increases the level of energy debt that the body is in will have an impact on body image. So, this can be anything as mundane as missing a snack right through to intentional daily restriction that’s kept up for an ongoing period.
Energy balance isn’t just impacted by the energy coming in but is also impacted by the level of energy that is used up. So, the level of movement or exercise you do can create a change if this is not adjusted to provide adequate energy and rest to support this movement.
But it’s not just physical exercise that uses more energy, stress in all its guises is hugely inefficient and an added energy demand. This could be a stressful time at work, with kids, with family or for any number of reasons.
I always remember Robert Sapolsky in his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers referencing research looking at chess grandmasters using 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day during a high-level tournament.
So, while your life stress probably isn’t creating an energy demand to this degree, it is creating an added demand and is probably having more of an impact than you imagine.
And this energy debt is then mixed with stress and the learned behaviour of focusing on your body as a way of controlling how you feel.
Interestingly, when working with clients in eating disorder recovery, increased body image issues are often an indicator that energy balance has gotten worse.
So often I’ll have a consult and a client will say that they have been struggling more with body image. When we start to explore what has been going on, we find that their eating has decreased: they are having longer gaps between meals, a certain snack is being missed or their main meals have dropped down in size.
Or their energy expenditure increased: they have started exercising again, they upped their movement by walking more, doing more cleaning or they’re moving house and are doing the packing and physical work connected with this.
Often, they have even lost weight over this time. Which on paper should make them feel better with their belief that less weight equals more happiness or leads to more positive feelings. But in reality, the body image is worse and it’s directly connected to the increased energy-depleted state.
Poor sleep can be another common one (something I’ve covered in detail here and here). Less sleep has an impact on our physiology and psychology. One poor night of sleep, where you took an eternity to fall asleep or were awake in the night for a couple of hours and this can be enough to impact body image (amongst other things).
And even without any obvious triggers, we all have days where we simply wake up and feel meh. For whatever reason, our internal functioning has changed and we are noticing this at the level of our lived experience.
When we are in the realm of body image as a state, the focus is on how to get through this specific moment.
When chatting with Summer I referred to polyvagal theory, something I cover in much more detail here. Polyvagal theory looks at the role that our nervous system has on emotion regulation, social connection and the fear response.
In simplified terms, depending on the state of our nervous system, it will impact the types of thoughts and feelings that arise and our perception of ourselves and the world at large.
So, from a polyvagal perspective, if we are experiencing a nervous system state that is leading to feelings of poor body image, the goal isn’t how to focus on the body image but rather on changing our state as a whole.
This change could be through hugging a partner, singing, listening to music, chatting with a friend, petting a dog or any of the multitude of ways we can shift our nervous system.
At the other end of the state spectrum, when body image issues rise up, you can do nothing.
Instead, you acknowledge that this is a transitory event and that these thoughts and feelings will pass (or at least, the intensity of them will decrease).
You remind yourself that just because you had certain thoughts, doesn’t mean that they are true or that you believe them.
And you remember that your self-worth isn’t determined by your body size so instead you put your focus on the things that matter.
At its core, this approach is about learning mindfulness and acceptance.
Now, obviously, this is a practice and you need to do the work to be able to do this. And even then, you’ll have easier and then more challenging times with it. But this level of equanimity connected to changes in thoughts, feelings and emotions is a learnable skill.
As I mentioned at the start, while state and trait are often talked about as discrete and separate, I believe they are much more intermingled.
This is especially true in the area of body image, given how behaviours become so ingrained.
For example, if you go on a diet, the restriction of food is going to lead to a change in state. But when you diet on and off for 20 years, this change in state feels more like a trait.
The same is true with an eating disorder. What at first seems like a change in thoughts and feelings, with enough time, starts to feel normal and like who you are.
Or, if at age five, you are critical of your body, this causes a change in your state at that moment. You then continue that behaviour for the next four decades and this now feels like a trait.
Now, it’s not that I don’t believe that traits exist, they certainly do. Genetics clearly has an impact on personality traits and anyone who is a parent can see that much of the way kids are is because of nature not nurture.
But in the area of body image, this is much more in the realm of nurture and learned behaviour. Because we aren’t hardwired to hate our bodies.
Now I need to add, that behaviours that start to happen, whether it is dieting, restriction, over-exercise or critically speaking about your body, don’t randomly occur. We live in a culture that creates and perpetuates this way of being with its explicit and implicit messaging.
And because this messaging is so ubiquitous and ingrained, again, it can be much easier to see something as a trait rather than a state. Without an escape from this to provide a contrasting experience, it simply feels like the truth.
I am reminded here of the work of psychologist Dan Gilbert. He talks about how our current state has an impact not just on our current experience, but also on how we remember the past (our memories) and our ability to predict the future (forecasting).
A big part of this is because we fail to account for the fact that at every moment we are in a particular state, even if this state is somewhat steady. What we think of ourselves or our thoughts and beliefs are less indelible truths and are actually state dependent.
And this then messes with our ability to imagine what it will be like in some future scenario and predict how we could be in this scenario.
To quote Gilbert “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly believe they’re finished.”
It’s such a common experience when working with clients for them to discover that something they believed was a trait and permanent feature of who they are, actually changes.
And if I list the kinds of behaviours that lead to this transformation in body image, it includes learning to:
(Note: many of the items on the above list come directly from Summer’s many podcasts on the topic of body image that you can see here)
One guarantee in life is that our body is always changing. And if we are lucky to live long enough, we will see this change in drastic ways. Because the reality is that we are all ageing out of beauty standards…or will at some point soon.
Body image issues don’t discriminate. I have worked with actresses and models who match up to society’s narrow beauty ideals but were still struggling. They struggled to love, accept, and embrace themselves.
This is because body image is always rooted in deeper reasons than mere aesthetics. And while I have covered some ideas in this article (and we covered more in this podcast), it is just scratching the surface of body image and how to improve it.
I’m a leading expert and advocate for full recovery. I’ve been working with clients for over 15 years and understand what needs to happen to recover.
I truly believe that you can reach a place where the eating disorder is a thing of the past and I want to help you get there. If you want to fully recover and drastically increase the quality of your life, I’d love to help.
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Note: I had a powerful reminder of the impact of one’s state when trying to write this article.
On the first day of writing, I woke up in a lower mood and a more negative state. My mind was fuzzy, everything felt difficult and I felt like I just wanted to crawl back into bed. I tried to write this article for a couple of hours and just didn’t get anywhere. I’ve had days like this before and was compassionate with myself. I put the article to the side and knew I would come back to it tomorrow.
On the second day of writing, things felt different. Ramsay (my son) woke me up and the first thing we did was go blackberry picking at the farm across the road from our house. We then had a long breakfast as a family before I headed up to my office in the garden to work. I sat down and this article easily flowed out of me. It probably took about four hours to write, split up across the day.
Nothing has fundamentally changed between these two days except for the state that I’m in. But that state has impacted my ability to write, among other things.
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